I recently read a story in MarketWatch about how a good cup of coffee can help fix the office... I don't necessarily disagree (and I'm a tea drinker). However, it made me think about this exact challenge from back in my corporate days, long before the Pandemic.
The issue of whether or not the company should provide higher quality beverages, particularly coffee, would be raised frequently, both at a local site level and to the Global Real Estate team. The assertion was that instead of providing free, generic coffee at the beverage stations... which apparently was "horrible", we should upgrade to Petes' or Starbucks (or better), as a low-cost way to boost employee engagement and act as a recruitment perk.
Makes sense.
Except that it didn't. At least not for a large company, with multiple offices and many thousands of employees. The cost would be prohibitive!
It boiled down (pardon the pun) to a simple math problem. The incremental price of each cup, multiplied by the number of cups consumed. But with a twist... better coffee created an increased demand, thereby increasing the costs further. In a 60000 employee company, if 20000 employees had 2 cups of coffee each day (not unreasonable), at $2 a pop, that's $20M/year. Better coffee was almost double the price. Add a multiple for increased demand, and... you can see where I'm going with this... the business will spend some serious cash on coffee!
Now, I'm not saying that better coffee doesn't have tangible benefits to the business, but the ROI should be looked at along with other investment choices like R&D, marketing, health care benefits, etc.
We largely solved the problem, by doing two things. Installing Keurigs at the beverage stations (people could use their own pods if they didn't like what we provided for free), and selling better coffee in our cafeterias.
The best of both worlds. A solution that satisfied employees, without breaking the bank!
https://lnkd.in/g-Fj5qQN
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